In communications, such as voice communications, voice data may be received in time division multiplexing (TDM) data for many different calls. The data may be received at a gateway and may be destined for multiple other gateways on an IP network. The data for a call is packetized and each packet is sent individually in an IP packet to a gateway. Each packet transported individually requires headers to be added. In case of IP version 4 typically a header of 38 bytes is added and in case of IP version 6 a header of 58 bytes is added. This header uses a lot of bandwidth and can far exceed the bandwidth required for the actual voice payload or be a significant percentage of the voice payload depending upon the encoding of voice.
Multiplexing may be used to insert data belonging to multiple calls into a single IP packet. For example, a voice payload that would be sent in a packet for a call may be included in the IP packet along with voice payloads from other calls. Because the goal is to save as much bandwidth as possible, as much header information as possible is removed. Further, when the IP packet is received at a destination, because as much header information as possible has been stripped out of the data in the IP packet, additional processing may be needed to process this packet such that it can be sent to its final destination. The additional processing includes determining information that would normally be included in the header, such as layer 4 information. Accordingly, bandwidth may be saved by sending a reduced header in the IP packet; however, additional processing is needed to generate the individual packets and process them from the data sent in the IP packet, which may increase latency or reduce the performance of the system.